1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telemedical data transfer. The present invention is an apparatus for bi-directional communication with medical and/or wellness devices. The apparatus allows universal telemedical data transfer from any medical and/or wellness device to any computer device.
2. Description of Related Art
Today many patients in need of medical services are enduring increasingly long waits in crowded emergency and waiting rooms. Even for routine examinations, it is not uncommon for patients to face long delays before meeting with their primary care provider. Furthermore, medical providers are often overbooked and cannot devote the time to their patients that once was common. Additionally, the costs of providing medical services have and continue to rise.
These factors have put pressure on medical service providers to find ways to streamline and enhance their medical practices. The medical field has adopted many technological devices to help in gathering the necessary data to provide correct medical diagnosis while maintaining an efficient and profitable practice. Some of these enhanced devices include stethoscopes, otoscopes, blood pressure cuffs, wearable thermometers, pulse oximeters, electrocardiograms, glucose monitors, and more. What these enhanced devices have in common is the electronic collection of medical vital signs and other data that is used by the medical professional to quickly and correctly identify medical issues for treatment. The idea is that by collecting the data electronically, wait times will be reduce, while also allowing medical providers to become more profitable.
However, with the proliferation of these data-gathering devices, medical professionals are discovering a new problem. That problem is how to efficiently gather and use the data produced from a myriad of incompatible medical devices. It is not uncommon for a medical practice to have high-tech equipment that employs a nurse to tediously and manually transfer the data generated using low-tech means such as pen and paper. So while the development of high-tech medical and wellness device had the goal of a more efficient and profitable practice, it oftentimes has resulted in additional labor and time to utilize the information generated.
Therefore, there is a long-felt need in the art for a universal, reliable, and consistent device and method to communicate with multiple medical and/or wellness devices and encode the data for efficient transmission.